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Sevilla FC: A brand that never stops growing

Based on the latest report by KPMG Football Benchmark, the value of Sevilla FC’s brand has been growing exponentially for the last few years due to the success both on and off the field. One of the aspects the club has improved has been its digital services. It has invested a lot of resources and effort in its visual design, user experience and improving its online brand.

With more than 30,000 subscribers, 1.5 million followers on Facebook, 850,000 on Twitter, 250,000 on Instagram, and an average of 250,000 unique monthly visitors to its website, the club's goal is to acquire more visitors and followers for its digital channels at a juncture when the football team is going through a good run of results in European competitions.

In the twenty-first century, being a successful soccer team means you better have in place a proper digital strategy, a well-established online presence and a powerful hosting infrastructure to cope with the increasing amount of fans demanding a great deal of information at precise times, such as right after relevant games or to welcome new players in the team.

To continue growing, Sevilla FC asked us to implement a series of quality and quantitative improvements in its digital services through web, mobile and social media channels.

Our multi-skilled team allowed us to offer a 360-degree digital strategy where our digital consultants defined the required improvements on the new platform always orientated to achieving measurable objectives.

Why Drupal was chosen

Drupal 8 is completely prepared for multingual sites.

Drupal 8 is the most secure open source CMS.

We have experience deploying scalable Drupal sites in AWS.

Drupal concepts are in line with our ideals as a company.

The previous site was built on Drupal 7.

Drupal is the most capable product/community development platform available.

It has several powerful workflow tools for content managing.

We love the Drupal scalability.

We can develop with an agile methodology and Drupal supports agile delivery.

The Challenge

Sevilla FC set out the need to implement a series of qualitative and quantitative improvements in the digital services they offered to its users. In particular, hardly nine months ago the soccer club was facing major digital and technological challenges.

A new digital strategy was required in order to significantly:

Enhance the club online brand image.

Increase audience levels.

Attract international public.

In addition (and partly as a consequence), its website required major enhancements in order to:

Withstand considerable traffic peaks.

Allow the creation of new content easily and quicker than ever.

Host content in a significantly higher number of languages.

A fully revamped versatile website was urgently needed to support and contribute to the tremendous success of this legendary Spanish soccer club.

Our team analyzed the general condition of the club’s digital channels in order to establish a starting point, after which we identified the followings technical and strategic goals.

Sevilla FC needed a platform for its future adapted to a growing brand.

This kind of website has a constant level of users which is rarely excessively high. Nevertheless in specific moments (hours, minutes) the number of visitors can multiply by 10 or even 100. For example: Important news regarding players, transfer rumors, etc. This kind of information can go viral through fans and social networks in a matter of minutes. This behavior is very common in any important club (football, basketball, etc.).

In addition, the club has gained international recognition because of its latest successes in Europe and the international players who have been signed (Japan, Brazil, France, etc.). This is why it was important to publish content in several languages. There are many reasons to read news regarding a football club: players, trainers, rumors, match reports, and interviews. All for a growing international audience.

Finally, due to the fact that Sevilla FC is a dynamic organization with an important communications department (12 languages) they needed a strong base on which to build its website:

Easy to update, publish or share content.

Multiple languages.

Multimedia capabilities.

Agile support and maintenance.

Adaptable to growth.

Easy to integrate with third party solutions: e-commerce, tickets, radio, social media, etc.

Secure.

In order to improve branding and acquisition specific digital changes were required.

It’s an ongoing joint operation with the Sevilla FC Marketing area, which constantly looks for improvements.

We were faced with a very extensive, diversified and fragmented digital environment that showed a lack of correlation and coherence among the different channels in terms of branding, content, message and multichannel integration. We discovered a predominance of channels, contents and messages in Spanish in a multilingual environment where content was only generated in Spanish in spite of an increasing number of international users.

The average monthly acquisition of visitors to the web from other media and sources is much higher than that achieved from social media, something which should be especially taken into account because sport is a social industry. The challenge was centered on improving this point.

We also faced issues related to trademark rights when it came to proposing and generating exclusive and quality content for Sevilla FC, which do not conflict with the rights of football institutions or sponsors.

In summary, we needed to propose and implement digital improvements related to:

Promoting the brand image.

Increasing the audience and international traffic acquisition.

Solution.

Goals, analysis and online strategy based on a Drupal 8 platform.

Our main goal was to adapt to our client’s needs. To do this we carried out a personalized consultation working with all the stakeholders (e-commerce, communication, marketing, content, etc.) to fully understand how they work and be able to provide the best online solution.

We also decided to use a new technical architecture based on Drupal 8. This allowed us to have a multilingual technological platform, which improved third-party integrations and offered a more accessible interface for editing, publishing and sharing user content.

A multilingual platform based on Drupal 8

With these requirements we decided to use Drupal 8. We had previously invested time, money and effort in learning the technology and therefore we knew how to get the most out of it. Without a doubt it was the best decision we could have made for a project of this kind taking into account: goals, size, budget, sustainability, scalability and delivery time.

Multisite

Drupal 8 is a platform adapted to multi-site architecture.

We found a main website and several satellite sites, all of which shared content. Our main challenge was to create a sole entry point for administrators and editors from where they could easily choose the site they needed to publish content on.

We decided the main site would be the one used to manage all other sites through APIs and content categories. Besides, most of these services could be reused for other platforms such as native mobile applications.

Content Management for Mobile Apps

The club offers mobile applications to its users which can be downloaded on Android or iOS. Drupal 8 allowed us to edit and publish most of the app content from a sole entry point and we centralized the content management (mobile, web, third parties system).

Multilingual

One of the most important features, which made us use Drupal 8 was its multilingual capability, i.e. being able to show content in different languages depending on the operating system or language selected. Due to Drupal 8’s multilingual system, we were easily able to manage all the translations into 14 languages. These idiomatic versions will be launched as soon as the club’s international communication team create the content.

Security

One of the reasons we chose Drupal 8 was because it is the most secure open source CMS in the market. Drupal 8 was stable and scalable enough for this critical website to be launched.

Performance

Software of the new platform has greatly improved performance, user experience, maintenance costs and hardware consumption. However, we had to make decisions related to the infrastructure which supports the new platform with critical requirements. Finally, we decided to use a simple, economic and optimized infrastructure, which was implemented with EC2 the Amazon Web Services.

To be able to cope with periods of high traffic, we implemented the CloudFront Web Services by Amazon. This measure and a good policy of caching/refresh of CloudFront has meant that concurrent access to the website could be improved tenfold.

To implement the system we have built a module, which helps to efficiently manage the cache refresh in Amazon Cloud Front Service. In this post we can find more information related to the integration about our module and Drupal 8, strategic consulting of market, contents, management and organization of the Digital Marketing environment and procedures.

Below we set out the different phases of the digital project.

Benchmarking

A comprehensive strategic analysis was conducted onto the social environments of Seville FC and its direct and indirect competitors and they were also put into perspective with market data from Facebook and Twitter and other segments of football audiences.

Design and Branded Content

With the aim of aligning ideas and strategies with the client's team and also unifying the graphic line of Sevilla FC towards the Digital Media, content workbooks and style guides were created and a Branded Content strategy was created. This process -was carried by always involving the client, whose perspective helped both achieving the objectives and understanding the users of the different channels and also to being able to offer those users what they demanded into a very segmented and differentiated way.

From Communication to Content Marketing

Starting from the analysis of the structure and typology of publications, the evolution of channels from mere Communication to Digital Marketing and Digital Content Marketing was established as a starting point for strategic improvement and standardization. We gave the client, therefore, keys in terms of structure of publications and configuration of messages and publications in order for him to be capable of moving from communication to persuasion.

Web Analytics, Content Curation and Inbound Marketing

An in-depth study of audiences and traffic acquisition according to the different countries and target languages in Google Analytics was carried out to examine general trends in order to determine at which exact points of analysis it was necessary to influence in order to achieve the client’s goals.

Once the parameters of the starting point were analyzed and established, customized reports and dashboards were generated that allowed an approximation to the understanding of the behavior of the audiences according to the numerous variables that needed to be weighed. These panels would also allow the possibility of carrying a contrasted analysis and to put data entry into perspective at any time.

On this basis, we proceeded to give keys to approaching inbound marketing and content curation through the understanding of user preferences regarding content consumption.

SMO and SEO

In order to keep improving both the traffic acquisition strategies and audience growth objectives, an analysis and proposal for the writing of content focused on SEO and search engines marketing applicable to the social channels of the main search engine worldwide -Google + and Youtube- were made.

Results

A satisfied client and measurable results are the best visiting card.

Within the many results we obtained from this project (and we are still working on improving it) we highlight customer satisfaction. In addition, helping and improving both strategies (technical and digital), tactics and metrics of a digital marketing project with a client of international stature in the sport industry was a challenge whose outcome we feel very satisfied with:

The monthly increase of both user acquisition and global audience has already risen by 10 percent.

There has been a marked improvement in the experience of the users who access through the digital channels for which the consultancy was conducted, which has resulted in positive feedback regarding both their satisfaction and loyalty.

Back office user satisfaction with the new published, edited and translated versions was unanimous.

Performance of the new platform has improved tenfold.

Stability and high availability of the website.

More readability of the code.

Implementation

La Drupalera is the premier Drupal agency in Spain and a global leader in Drupal consulting and development. We create products for a digital world and help large clients through innovation, end-user engagement and technical quality. We are proud to be serving well-known brands to achieve their ambitious business objectives. Our secret: knowing the Drupal Community and all its resources.

Formed in 1890, Sevilla FC is one of the oldest and most relevant soccer teams in Spain. The club has won a number of trophies and titles that make it one of the most successful teams in Europe in recent times. Sevilla FC has become the only club in history to have won the Europa League five times.

La Drupalera understood our needs extremely well, applying their deep digital knowledge to the football and sports industry. Engaging with fans, increasing our database and designing new digital assets are critical for a club like us. La Drupalera's team has more than met our expectations.”
- Ramón Loarte, chief marketing officer, Sevilla Fútbol Club S.A.D

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Savant, the company behind the home automation software powering Bono’s castle and Steve Jobs’ yacht, has the association that many luxury brands could only dream of. But as they made the leapt into building products for the mass market it became apparent that the brand elements and brand communication did not live up to that cache.

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Formed in 1890, Sevilla FC is one of the oldest and most relevant soccer teams in Spain. The club has won a number of trophies and titles that make it one of the most successful teams in Europe in recent times. Sevilla FC has become the only club in history to have won the Europa League five times.